Locating Intergenerational Ties, rematriating late-19th-century unpublished photographs of Sámi Women and Children

Locating Intergenerational Ties, rematriating late-19th-century unpublished photographs of Sámi Women and Children

Employing a decolonial approach inspired by critical museology and Indigenous studies, LIT aims to initiate a visual restitution/rematriation process fostering attention to Sámi people’s experiences during colonial encounters, and to illuminate individual life-stories of women and children photographed by Italian anthropologists Mantegazza and Sommier between 1879 and 1886. It wishes to generate dialogical knowledge of unpublished visual/written materials, enabling Sámi communities of interest to gain access to these scholars’ photographs. In complex socio-historical Indigenous/settler contexts such as Sápmi (the Sámi homeland), Sámi people’s control over their own heritage has proved essential to processes of cultural and ethnopolitical self-determination. Part of the Sámi visual heritage consists of photographs taken - often through mild violence and coercion - by academics engaged in physical anthropological practices involving Sámi individuals of all ages and genders. The resulting academic and divulgative publications circulated in Europe for decades, shaping and reinforcing stereotypes of Sámi peoples and cultures. Photos taken in colonial encounters by late-19th/early-20th century scholars to visualize Sámi people’s supposed biological-cultural inferiority (until a few decades ago inaccessible to the Sámi) have become important means of decolonization and empowerment through art and activism. The visual restitution of such photographs is of the utmost importance not only from a cultural heritage perspective but is also considered by Sámi institutions and individuals as an urgent necessity. LIT proposes an innovative approach based on the co-construction of knowledge and with a gender dimension. I shall reconstruct life stories of women and children photographed by Italian ethnologists, locating their descendants and returning their photographs to their communities. LIT would benefit my career, making me a leading researcher in Sami Studies and museology.